The 222 Club is what hardly what you would call a “dive” bar, but the intersection of Turk and Hyde Streets in the Tenderloin District certainly qualifies in the “gritty urban edge” department. The 222 is all that’s left of the famous modern jazz club The Black Hawk. In its day, the Black Hawk  was the most important modern jazz club in the Bay Area. Charlie Parker used to play hookie from paying gigs just to jam at the Hawk because he liked it better. Dave Brubeck, one of the spiritual founders of the West Coast Cool style of jazz, played there. Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk recorded critically distinguished records in the Black Hawk’s recording studio annex – now the 222 Club. Co-owner and cashier Helen Noga discovered the singer Johnny Mathis there and went on to manage him to become a household name in the early ‘60s. Vince Guaraldi, who scored most of the original soundtracks for the television treatments of Charles M. Schultz’s “Peanuts” comic strip started out working as an intermission Black Hawk pianist, subbing in for Art Tatum. Vernon Alley, an African American jazz bassist, who is credited with doing much to desegregate Bay Area music clubs and the music unions, booked shows at the Hawk for years.

What was probably most impressive about this jazz nerve center, however, was its funky lived-in atmosphere . The drapes were black and moth-eaten. There was no air conditioning and no heat. During the rainy season, water from leaks in the roof collected in strategically-placed saucers around the club, creating a counter-tempo to the performing rhythm sections. The phone could ring at any time during a show, and the musicians just had to tolerate it. Said co-owner Guido Caccienti, “I work and slave hard to keep this place a sewer.”

The Black Hawk’s heyday was from about 1949 to 1963, after which it was closed and demolished except for the remaining 222 space. What used to be the club’s main section is now a vast parking lot. People hustle paperbacks and pirated DVDs against the cyclone fence surrounding the space. Although it was an important part of the cultural legacy of the city there isn’t even a plaque to commemorate the club, but the locals remember it.

After the closure in the late sixties, 222 Hyde became one of the city’s first tranny bars, according to current co-owner Joe Kaplan. Then it was eventually abandoned. For a number of years it was a burned out shell of a space frequently occupied by street squatters until Kaplan and his wife Bianca acquired it around 2000. They completely rebuilt the inside and reopened in 2004. Now a long narrow bar area gives way to a sub-level where live music, experimental hip hop, and acid jazz is spun and performed, keeping up with innovations in improvisational sound. Vintage Black Hawk posters are framed on the bare brick walls and the club has the agreeable vibe of a Lower East Side performance lounge transplanted to San Francisco.

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